Life with emotions: in conclusion

We all experience the same emotions, but each of us experiences them in our own way. The way I feel, let's say anger, is in many ways unlike the way my wife is angry. We know this because we have been living together for more than twenty years, but it would have been difficult for us to describe these differences. Like most people, we do not have a scheme for exploring how our experiences differ and how they can coincide. But we do know that we do not have exactly the same concrete trigger of anger and that I fall into anger faster than she does, but apart from this, we can say little. When one of us or both of us are angry, we are too caught up in the moment to recognize other differences in how we experience this emotion. But at the same time, when we are angry, we have the general characteristics of the experience experienced by each of us - usually the obstacle to what we are going to do causes our anger, and besides, we demonstrate similar facial expressions, our voices become harsh, our hearts beat more often, and hands become warmer. Our individual differences are located around these universal manifestations of emotions.
It is quite reasonable that I describe the individual differences in emotional experience in the last chapter of this book, because its material is based on the results of the research that I am conducting at the moment and which I have been preparing for the last decade with my friend and colleague Robert Levenson. Although my best work is devoted to universal elements of emotions, I am now studying the completely opposite phenomenon - the uniqueness of the emotional experience of each person. Individual differences were present in my study of universal characteristics of emotions, as they are present in almost any study on emotions, but since the evidence for the universality of expressions of emotions was very convincing, the question of individual differences could be put aside.
I was attracted to the question of universality, because it had an amazing background and caused controversy between famous scientists. After I resolved these disputes, much to my satisfaction, I felt an interest in the subject of individual differences, which could help me improve my understanding of my own life and the lives of my family members and my friends. I'm not trying to figure out why we differ in how we experience emotions. The first step should be to identify these differences, to find out what they are, to establish the basis for the individual emotional profiles of the unique ways we experience each emotion. It is surprising to me that some of the most fundamental questions about how people differ from each other in their emotional experience were not only not answered, but these questions themselves were not even posed.
We really know that people differ in the typical strength of the emotions they experience. Some people usually show a strong reaction of anger, and others, on the contrary, moderate or even weak (and not only because they intentionally control their anger). Some people come to a state of anger faster than others, someone’s anger persists for a very long time, and someone shows up in the form of short-term attacks. As soon as the anger begins to subside, it can disappear very quickly, or, conversely, decrease gradually. Therefore, considering only these four types of differences in emotional experience — the rate of emergence, the strength of the emotional response, the duration of the emotional response, and the time needed to recover and return to the original state — many interesting questions arise. If a person quickly comes to a state of anger, then does he really calm down just as quickly or can the period of returning to the initial state be long? If you have anger quickly, does that mean that your anger reaction will be very strong or can it have moderate intensity? And if your anger is very strong, does this mean that it will usually be short-lived, that is, manifest itself in the form of short but strong attacks, or can it last for a long time?
I found several answers to these questions thanks to the data that I have just analyzed and prepared for publication. Surprisingly, everything that could happen did happen. Take the relationship between strength and speed of reaction. I expected to find that the quick response would usually be strong, but it turned out to be strong and weak in about the same number of subjects. A slow reaction was manifested in both strong and weak forms. A similar picture was observed when considering the relationship between the duration of the reaction (how long the emotion lasted) and the intensity of the reaction. I thought that if you show a strong reaction, it will last longer. But it turned out that it is not. Both in people with a strong reaction and in people with a weak reaction, short and long-lasting reactions were observed in approximately equal proportions. We continue this study and look for answers to other questions about how people differ.
The frequency of emotion is another characteristic that is of great importance for understanding the emotional profile of the individual. You may be a person whose anger arises slowly, who never becomes furious, whose anger lasts for a long time and then disappears instantly, but you can have such episodes of anger only a few times a year. Or this topic may arise several times a week. How well we can control what we do, talk and feel during an emotional episode is another important element of the emotional profile of each individual, and another element is how clearly we signal to other people about our emotions. Some people express their emotions very strongly and clearly with their face and voice, even when they try to control them. Another element of the profile are those events that are most likely to trigger each of our emotions.
Will what we find out about one emotion, such as anger, apply to fear or sadness? Will a person have the same emotional profile - quick onset of emotion, moderate intensity, long duration, quick sedation, frequent occurrence, good controllability with clear signals - for anger, fear, sadness? Or in other words: if a person gives strong emotional signals by face and voice, will serious changes occur in his autonomic nervous system or are these two emotional response systems unrelated? Answers to these questions, apparently, should be positive in terms of one part of the emotional profile that we are able to explore: the force of a person’s emotional reaction will be the same for anger, fear, sadness and disgust, and the force shown in expressions is equivalent to the force of reactions autonomic nervous system. Much more work needs to be done to repeat these results and explore other aspects of the emotional profile. ^[222]
If you want to create your own emotional profile or the profile of another person with whom you are in a close relationship, then you can find the necessary tool for this on the website paulekman.com.
Now let me describe the general characteristics found in emotions. Given the ideas outlined in the previous sections, we can say that emotion has the following defining characteristics:

• There is a feeling, a set of sensations that we experience and of which we often know.
• An emotional episode can be brief, sometimes lasting only a few seconds, or much longer. If it lasts for hours, then we are dealing with mood, not emotion.
• Emotion is caused by something that is of great importance to a person.
• We experience emotions as something that arises in us, and not chosen by us.
• The evaluation process, in which we constantly sort out all that matters to us, is usually carried out automatically. We are not aware of the assessment process, unless it turns out to be long enough.
• There is a period of immunity, during which information and knowledge stored in our memory are eliminated, with the result that we gain access only to what reinforces the emotion we are experiencing. The immunity period can last only a few seconds or be much longer.
• We learn about our emotional state as soon as the emotion begins, that is, after the completion of the initial assessment. Once we are aware that we are in the grip of emotions, we can begin to overestimate the situation.
• There are universal themes of emotions, reflecting the history of our evolution, in addition to the many variations on these themes that are conditioned by our culture and that we reflect on our individual experience. In other words, emotions cause us something that mattered for our ancestors, as well as what we ourselves discovered matters to our own life.
• The desire to experience or not to experience certain emotions largely motivates our behavior.
• An effective signal — clear, fast, and universal — informs other people about the emotions that a person is experiencing.
• Fake expressions of emotions can be detected, albeit with difficulty, due to more noticeable asymmetry, lack of characteristic muscle movements, which are typical for sincere expression, but can hardly be reproduced intentionally, as well as through a temporary discrepancy between the appearance of the expression of emotion and the words spoken.
• Emotions masked with a smile can appear in the upper part of the face - in the upper eyelids, eyebrows and the condition of the surface of the forehead.

In conclusion, I would like to tell you a little more detail about guilt, shame, and embarrassment. ^{[223] [224]} These emotions do not have characteristic facial expressions. Guilt and shame are difficult to distinguish from sadness, except when a person tilts his head. However, the absence of characteristic signals for feelings of guilt and for shame has its own meaning, because when a person experiences these emotions, he usually does not want others to know about it, and perhaps therefore the signals about these emotions were not developed by man. As for embarrassment, everything is somewhat more complicated. Redness of the face cannot qualify as a signal of embarrassment, because it is difficult to see it in people with dark skin. Dacher Keltner showed that there is no one expression of embarrassment, like the expressions of anger, fear, disgust, contempt, sadness and pleasure. Instead, embarrassment is manifested through a sequence of expressions. ^[225] Perhaps embarrassment arose in the course of the history of our evolution later and not enough time had elapsed for any effective signal to be generated for it.
Envy is another emotion that has most of the above characteristics, except for the presence of a signal of its appearance. ^[226] I do not consider jealousy as an emotion unless it is about emotional scenes or scenes involving three actors: a person who is afraid of losing the attention of another person, another person and a rival. Within the framework of such a plot, we can say something about what emotions each of these three experiences, but these emotions will not necessarily always be the same. An opponent may experience guilt, shame, fear, anger, or contempt, depending on the circumstances. Anyone who is concerned about the loss of attention from another person may experience anger, fear, sadness or disgust. A person whose attention is sought by others may experience many different emotions.
Even though embarrassment, guilt, shame and envy do not have clear and effective signals, I do not doubt that they are also emotions. I have not dedicated separate sections to them, because I have not yet conducted relevant studies.
I described many of the emotions that fill our lives and the triggers of each of them, explained when and why they are useful for us, how to recognize the most subtle expressions of these emotions from other people and how to use information that we can extract from these intangible expressions, at work, in family life and in relationships with friends. The first sections were devoted to two of the most difficult problems that arise for most of us in our emotional life. I explained why it is so difficult to change what makes us feel emotions. It is really difficult, but not impossible. We need to identify our own hot triggers and understand what factors influence the likelihood that we can weaken them. It is no less difficult, although it is possible, to change the way we act when we experience emotions, so that our emotional behavior does not harm other people or ourselves. The key to this is to develop a certain type of awareness, which I call mindfulness ; it allows us to recognize when we are in the grip of emotions, before too much time passes. The book provides exercises to increase our awareness of the physical sensations that we experience with each of the emotions; These exercises will help you become more attentive to yourself.
When I began researching emotions many years ago, the number of scientists around the world who conducted such research was very small. Now their number has increased many times. A textbook has recently been published, consisting of more than forty chapters, each of which is devoted to specific research results and questions about emotions, moods, and emotional personality traits. ^[227] Here I did not try to tell everything that I know, and on the contrary, I tried to present only what I think is most important for understanding and improving emotional life, and only what I understand best. . In the coming decade, many new results will be obtained that will complement what I told you about.

AFTERWARD

I want to share with you further reflections on one of the emotional skills described at the beginning of the book - about the ability to carefully and consciously perceive the beginning of the emergence of this or that emotion in us.
Nature does not allow us to easily recognize those moments in which we have emotions, not to mention the awareness of how we automatically make assessments of the surrounding world that generate our emotions. For most people, it is almost impossible to ever know about those automatic assessment processes that initiate emotional episodes. Dan Goleman called it a judging mind . ^[228] But thanks to perseverance, thanks to the development of skills that nature did not provide us with and the acquisition of which she made difficult for us, some people can acquire the awareness of impulses , that is, learn to learn about the impulse caused by the emotion . I do not think that emotions have evolved in such a way as to facilitate our acquisition of awareness of impulses. It looks as if our emotional system does not want our consciousness to interfere in this question.
More than forty-five years ago, Frank Gorman, my mentor in psychotherapy, said that my goal should be to help patients increase the interval between impulse and action. Buddhists speak of the awareness of a spark (arising to initiate an emotion) before the appearance of a flame (by which they understand the emotional behavior caused by emotion). They do not ask us to be aware of the assessment that causes the spark. Western scholars and Buddhists have the same point of view on this issue.
Awareness of impulses is a high standard. I do not believe that anyone can acquire it, and it seems to me unlikely that even those who meet this standard now will always meet it. ^[229] But the efforts that we put into developing awareness of impulses will benefit in what is achievable for almost all of us - awareness of emotional behavior or recognition of our emotional state as soon as it begins to be expressed in words and actions. If you can realize that emotion has begun to control your behavior, then you can consciously consider whether your emotional response really corresponds to the situation you are in, and if so, whether your reaction has the right intensity and whether it manifests itself in the most constructive way. .
Since this is so important, I would like to briefly describe here the ways in which we can improve our awareness of emotional behavior , and some of us, at least for a while, improve our awareness of impulses .

• Do exercises that increase awareness of the physical changes that occur in your body when emotions arise, so that these changes signal to you that you are beginning to experience emotional arousal. (These exercises are given in the middle of the relevant sections on emotions.)
• Determine when you become emotionally agitated, especially in a way that you will later regret; To do this, start a diary of emotional episodes that made you feel sorry. This will allow you to begin to cool these triggers by analyzing the possibility of importing scenarios from past emotional experience.
• Learn to see the emotional reactions of the person with whom you are talking, so that you can use his reactions to adjust your own emotions.

I would also like to mention a method of conscious meditation that is complementary to the above methods. I didn’t talk about him in detail in this book, because the evidence that meditation really improves emotional life is just starting to gather. Some results look promising, but it is still too early to say exactly what improvements are being achieved, whether it is useful to everyone and how long the benefits provided by it are preserved. Moreover, earlier I could not understand why the concentration of our consciousness on breathing can improve our emotional life.
Like a bolt from the blue, a few weeks before writing this epilogue, I came up with an explanation of this phenomenon. The very practice of learning to focus on an automatic process that requires conscious monitoring develops the ability to be attentive to other automatic processes. We breathe, not thinking about how we do it, we are not trying to consciously control every breath and exhalation. Nature does not require us to divert our attention to breathing. When we try to do this, we usually endure no more than one minute without being distracted by any other thoughts. Developing the ability to focus on breathing requires several days of practice, during which we master new nerve pathways that allow us to do this. And here is an interesting effect:these skills are transferred to other automatic processes -improving awareness of emotional behavior and ultimately providing awareness to some people of impulses . I tested this explanation in conversations with well-known experts in meditation and with experts in emotions and brain activity, and they all admitted that it had good reasons. ^[230]
I recommend trying conscious meditation to see if it suits you. As I have already noted, this will not be easy, and, perhaps, will not improve your emotional life a little if it is not used regularly. In each city directory you can find phone numbers of services that teach meditation, and sometimes completely free. There are many different types of meditation; what you are seeking is called conscious meditation. There are also many books that will allow you to learn more about this type of meditation yourself. ^[231]
Let us now turn to the question of how to increase our awareness of the feelings of others.
In Section 10, I described micro-expressions that can help recognize hidden emotions, but did not say anything about weakchanges in facial expression, considered in sections from the 5th to the 8th. If you know what to look for, then sometimes you can find out how people feel before they show light expressions of emotions on their faces that they come to a state of emotional arousal. Sometimes subtle expressions occur when people who show them know exactly what they feel, but do not want to show it to others. Such a barely noticeable expression, which I call information leakage ^[232] , is all that persists on the face after attempts to censor expressions of emotions.
The test offered in the appendix and the photos of Eva in Chapters 5 through 8 illustrate everything that I was able to find out about the weak expressions of emotions on my face. New "Method of teaching to work with weak expressions", orSETT ( Subtle Expression Training Tool ), allows you to make these photos more alive. Working on my site, you can quickly achieve the desired results. “The method of teaching micro-expressions ” ( METT ) and the “Method of teaching how to work with weak expressions” ( SETT ) are used by thousands of people of various professions. Most recently, I have prepared improved versions of each of these methods. In METT2 , photographs of eighty-four people are used, one half of which are men and the other women are from six different ethnic groups. In SETT2photos of men and women from six ethnic groups are now included in addition to many of the pictures shown in this book. Getting the right skills is not easy; to save some of them, in particular for awareness skills, constant practice is required. Acquisition of some skills is like learning to ride a bike: once learned, they remain with you forever and you do not need to constantly update them. I suspect that this group includes skills that you can gain with SETT and METT . Training practice of working with these methods will help you for some time, but then it will become unnecessary to you, as your eyes will be able to correctly distinguish the most diverse and delicate facial expressions.
But acquiring skills without acquiring knowledge will not be enough for you. To improve your emotional life, you need to understand every emotion: the history of its occurrence, universal themes that trigger the corresponding emotion, the most typical variations of these themes, the function of the emotion - what it does for us, how it relates to different moods and when and how it can cause emotional disorders, as discussed in sections 5 through 9. I am sure that in the coming years, thanks to the research of scientists, we will learn many interesting things about emotions. Stay tuned for new discoveries.